Raytheon Hypersonic cruise missile image

WASHINGTON: The intense debate over the capabilities of hypersonic missiles divides US scientists and experts along political lines and that is complicating the Pentagon’s investment decisions, finds a new study by the non-profit Aerospace Corporation.

Indeed, in many ways, today’s debate about hypersonic missile tech echoes the ideological (some have said practically religious) wars over missile defense in the 1980s that still resonate across the US national security community.

“This is not, in some ways, a new technology,” said Sam Wilson, author of the Aerospace Corporation’s new study, “The Hypersonic Missile Debate.” “More than 40 years ago we, we launched a high-tech glider that traveled at hypersonic speeds, which was called the Space Shuttle. … There’s a lot of information about the technology; it’s just there’s just very different assessments. … just extremely different characterizations of the technology.”

Tom Mahnken, president of the respected Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), cautioned against early conclusions. “People should kind of step back from this a little bit, and kind of see where we are in the development of hypersonics,” he said at a panel discussion today about the report. “In some ways, it’s too early to say ‘game changer,’ or ‘nothing.’ And I would say, just to put it starkly, each of those positions is probably likely to be untrue or inaccurate.”

The basis for such extremely polarized views of whether hypersonic missiles are a revolutionary capability or not a leap at all lies in widely disparate views about our strategic relations with Russia and China, Wilson explained in an interview. Those on the right-wing of the political spectrum believe the US can, and should, try to out-compete Russia and China — including eating into their nuclear deterrent capabilities. Those who lean left believe the goal should be to dampen strategic competition, including through improved resilience and arms control.

That strategic debate extends even to opposing views about what historical lessons were learned from the Cold War, Wilson said. Right-leaning pundits assert the US outspent and out-innovated Russia to ‘win’ that 50-year ideological conflict; left-leaning ones contend it proved there can never be a winner in an expensive arms racing.

Most recently, as Breaking D readers were first to know, the debate broke out with the Pentagon’s director of hypersonic research, Michael White, pushing back publicly against a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) criticizing the effectiveness of hypersonic missiles. (UCS scientists were among the early critics of the Reagan-era ‘Star Wars’ program’s efforts to build myriad space-based missile defenses — technology that 40 years later still has not been deemed cost-effective by the Pentagon.)

The study found four discrete viewpoints, from right to left on the political scale:

  1. Get Ahead. The United States should seek to lead in offensive hypersonics capability and use hypersonics to achieve strategic advantages over Russia and China.
  2. Shields Up. The United States should invest in new capabilities to track adversarial missiles (conventional and nuclear) during their flight and intercept them before they reach their target.
  3. Draw the Line. This approach emphasizes defense against conventionally armed hypersonics, drawing the line between conventional and nuclear hypersonic weapons.
  4. Avoid the Race. The United States should rely on nuclear deterrence to address hypersonic threats and avoid a costly action-reaction cycle.
CSBA graphic

Notional flight paths of hypersonic boost-glide missiles, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles. (CSBA graphic)

Participants informally polled online during today’s seminar — mainly DoD officials, military leaders, defense industry representatives and defense-related think tankers — fell into Category No. 1.

DoD is pumping huge sums of money into research on both offensive hypersonic missiles and defenses agains them. As Sydney and I first reported, the Pentagon asked Congress for $2.9 billion for hypersonic weapons in 2021, up not quite 14 percent from a 2020 total of $2.5 billion. For hypersonic defense, the department requested another $207 million in 2021, up from $157 million in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

A CRS report, Hypersonic Weapons: Background and Issues for Congress, noted that the Pentagon hasn’t really committed to long-term efforts to build offensive hypersonic missiles. So far, there aren’t any hypersonic programs embedded in the budget as a program of record.

“At present, the Department of Defense (DOD) has not established any programs of record for hypersonic weapons, suggesting that it may not have approved either requirements for the systems or long-term funding plans,” the report says. “Indeed, as Assistant Director for Hypersonics (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering) Mike White has stated, DOD has not yet made a decision to acquire hypersonic weapons and is instead developing prototypes to assist in the evaluation of potential weapon system concepts and mission sets.”

Therefore, CRS recommends that Congress ask DoD pointed questions about “the rationale for hypersonic weapons, their expected costs, and their implications for strategic stability and arms control.”

The Aerospace study is agnostic regarding technological reality. Wilson said the study’s goal instead is to help policy-makers sort through why opinions are so divided, and figure out how to methodically work through that divide.

“I think that it’s really important to try to unpack the strategic from the technological, because I think these things are so entwined,” he said.

Another important step, Wilson added, would be for the incoming Biden administration to look very seriously at what the end goals are vis-a-vis US relationships with Russia and China writ large.

“What do we want from the relationship with Russia and China? How much of our focus should be on preparing for high-intensity major conflict with Russia and China, and what are the parameters of that conflict? I think by starting to ask those questions we can get a better understanding of where hypersonic missiles could fit in,” he said.